The 24-bpp format is a true-color format, in which each pixel stores 8 bits for red, green, and blue. The advantage of this format is that image quality is very good. Because each pixel occupies exactly 3 bytes, the pixels can be packed together without wasting memory. The drawback is that because half the pixels in this scheme cross DWORD boundaries, there is a performance penalty in accessing and decoding pixels. The following illustration shows the arrangement of memory for the format.